


longhaul

by regresssion



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Christmas Party, Christmas lore, F/F, Jacqui can cook, M/M, Mako's a damn lightweight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 08:02:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13142436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regresssion/pseuds/regresssion
Summary: After the Chime's escape from Counterweight, the gang are stuck on a painfully slow flight to September when a weird OriCon holiday rolls around.A Secret Samol 2017 gift for @aetherkids x





	longhaul

No one liked the mood aboard the ship. It was sullen in deeply unusual ways: the cockpit, usually a raucous mess of colour and violence, was clean and quiet for the first time any of them could remember, they didn't quite trust the space-worthiness safety ratings on the new mechs so couldn't do live fire-testing (much to Jacqui's disappointment), Mako was spending most of each day cycle staring, eyes glassy and pearlescent, at a wall in the dining area, and AuDy, well. At least, in the gap where their arm once was, a soft chitter of digital synapses and the occasional flash of blue at the end of the exposed optical fibres indicated that _something_ was happening at the very least. What exactly that was no one could know for sure, only guess. Finding some semblance of normalcy was a fool's errand, but the Chime were surprisingly successful fools and attempted to anyway.

Day forty-seven happened to be Exmass, and, just as they had for the last few years, the crew gathered together to celebrate another year and, as ever, get each other frighteningly drunk. At least AuDy's literally dry humour wouldn't be there to chastise them, but as Orth wheeled the charging dock down the corridor and around the back of the sofas, the look Aria flashed at Cass was one of trepidation and anxiety.

"It's weird that they're... I'm totally expecting a monotone voice to tell me exactly which number drink I'm on and for me to reply that AuDy should mind their own business and for AuDy to reply that we're colleagues in a business arrangement." Aria was in a chatty mood that usually only emerged when she was on stage, trying to see into someone's soul or plied with enough alcohol. It was fun to be around, regardless how she got there.

"AuDy was certainly on form last year." Cass chuckled, and leant back with a grin, hand on the side of their head.

"Oh, you mean that actually happened? I swear I remembered most of the night..."

"I mean, you did decide it would be a great idea to launch a tonne of fireworks out the back of the ship in the middle of Krillem dome." Cass' head was cocked at an even more improbable angle.

"But it was so _preeeetyyy-_ ". Something caught Aria's attention, and she squinted straight at Cass. "Huh thought it was just the gill pattern- _Oh my god Cass is that a lovebite?_ "

Suddenly the hand that had been fiddling with the crown atop their head slammed into the side of Cass' neck with a slap. They winced and let out a small whimper, forgetting they were trying to hide a bruise in the first place. Aria managed to hold it together for just a moment, before she let out a small squeal of delight. Cass slowly turned a rather fetching shade of lavender, first on their cheeks, then all the way down their neck and shoulders.

Suddenly sensing an opportunity, Aria shook the laughter off her face and glared with mischief. "I have a proposition. You give me details, and I don’t get you and Mako make out with each other when we inevitably play truth or dare later."

"You're evil, you know that?"

"Why on earth would you keep me around otherwise?" Aria slapped the seat next to her and scooted over to make room. Cass grabbed a first drink of many from the table in from of them before sliding in.

"It wasn't a planned thing, I just... It was last Sunday. He was out of it, I was around making pasta for the week and getting frustrated; you know we're out of real squid ink so I had to improvise and I could tell something was really off with this batch. I just left him there, when he's fogging you can't really do much, right? So I have several small tantrums and finally manage to get it together, and I'm starving by now so I settle down to eat. I'm trying to keep track of all the news from Apostalos so I was buried in the last squawk and he just leans over and says "You look stressed". He was smiling, the bastard, I had no idea how long he was sitting there watching me for. And I just couldn't keep it in and sobbed into his stupid orange tank top. And he obviously wasn't just gonna leave me there, so he dragged me back to his room and made chipper small talk while I crawled up into a small ball on the bed and attempted to imagine the sheets suddenly gaining sentience, taking pity on me and swallowing me whole. And I said I cared about him and he said he's trying to look out for me and he wants me to be happy and feel good and he... We just needed people, I think."

Aria fiddled with Cass' hair in her lap; Cass had shifted from leaning on their knees, to lying back, to lying tucked between Aria's legs as they talked. "Yeah, I think we do need each other right now."

A loud clunk and cough erupted from behind them simultaneously, and the two on the sofa perked up just enough to see Jacqui, one arm on her hip, her other slammed into the door frame, with a small party hat at a slight jaunty angle perched atop her meticulous pink undercut, and Cass' apron, baby blue and dotted with cartoon shrimp, draped around her neck.

"I leave you for half an hour and you're cavorting with someone else? What a way to repay me for all the hard work I've been putting in, Aria."

"You _offered_ to cook. Something about insufficient protein in your diet if I remember correctly." Whatever it was that Jacqui had cooked up certainly smelled magnificent, a prized discovery from the Kingdom Come's small cryo-storage unit. Tender and meaty and fresh in a way that none of the crew had experienced since they stopped trying to scam racketeers in Centralia over exceptionally expensive dinners. Clearly attracted by the scent of food, Orth wandered back into the dining area.

"Well, don't let me distract you from this moment, which is clearly vastly more important than my poor bruised ego. Grab the plates, I'll be back with food in a minute."

Aria sniggered, jumped up after Jacqui and planted a kiss on the back of her neck. "The apron looks good on you".

"Crushing real hard on me looks good on you, babe", Jacqui said in a comically low, gravelly voice, after which she winked. She winked.

Orth and Cass both took their turn to burst out laughing, at Aria's expense this time. "Yeah yeah, get it out your system pals". She'd already put on a new blush, a metallic green, that she picked up when they returned from the Seabed. She might be a vivid red and have sweated enough in that short moment for her careful application to have gone to waste, but it wasn't anything a touch up couldn't remedy.

She set the table, clipping through the mix of single player chess games, journal articles on the Palagios family history and news blurbs that Cass had left projected onto its surface. The VI in the projector tried to fit the display to the new surfaces underneath it, leaving a picture of Sokrates confusingly surreal and somewhat cute as it bent itself into a circle across one of the dinner plates. Aria gave it a few annoyed looks, before jumping up and slapping the projector box attached to the ceiling. It seemed to get the message and turned the display off.

"The old girl might not be the smartest, but she's lasted long enough that I wouldn't dare try fix her up. Unless your slaps have a certain... power..."

Orth's wise-old-man act about the projector fizzled somewhat as he made eye contact with Aria and her extremely dubious eyebrow-raise.

"AuDy certainly doesn't like us beating the ship up, but if my slaps had magical healing properties I think both of us would have figured it out by know."

"Heh, fair enough." Orth slumped back down into his easy-chair (he had sold the ship including contents, he was glad to see an old companion again) and grabbed his whiskey from the table. He was somewhat drained from having dragged AuDy's platform from the cockpit all the way back to the common area, but he wasn't about to leave his friend behind. It's not the done thing.

He squeezed his temples with his eyes closed, sinking back into a happy nostalgia, and opened them again just in time to see Mako careering down the far corridor, screaming "POOL PARTYYYY-" and vaulting the back of the sofa, crashing in a pile on top of an outstretched Cass.

Despite barely having air in their lungs, Cass managed to croak out "Fish. Live. In the. SEA." before heaving Mako over onto his backside and straddling over him.

"Oh my word Mako you are seriously going to ruin me sooner or later."

"Well I wasn't planning on it, but I can make certainly adjustments."

Cass took a moment to process that exchange, before wailing and slamming their face into Mako's chest. Aria and Orth exchanged more meaningful eye contact, before Orth started congratulating the two of them and Aria dashed over with her bracelet's camera at the ready.

"I'm telling ya, no one should be allowed to try keep pace with me if they wanna, you know, not black out or convince everyone else on the ship to murder them."

Jacqui was back in the door Mako had just bolted through, holding a massive lamb shank in a baking tray, and tutting at the pile of Mako that was now only somewhat conscious and layed out couch. She placed in the middle of the table, took Aria's hand and dragged her back to the assembled chairs.

"It needs to rest and cool for a bit. And I think we all need another drink."

And so, a few minutes later with Mako having slid off the sofa sitting between Cass' knees, Jacqui squeezed into a beaten-up armchair next to Orth, AuDy tucked upright in the corner, and Aria doing the toasting honours, they all wished each other a merry Exmass. Orth's whiskey was in relatively short supply so they eventually switched to something clear and brutal that Jacqui had brought with her, and evidently the stuff that had put Mako in such a swimmingly good mood.

"So, like, Kalliope has some wack traditions but Exmass really isn't one them", Jacqui said, much to Aria's horror.

"Are you serious? It's literally the pinnacle of the year on Joypark. Doesn't get busier or brighter."

"I dunno, it's strange - I've picked up a load of the habits of Oricon life since moving to Counterweight, but no one ever like, explained why Exmass was such a big deal", Cass added.

"Fuck are you telling me I never like, sat you down and forced you to watch _An Exmass Adventure_ with me? I've played the lead, I've starred in a musical adaptation-"

"Wait what-". That got Jacqui's attention.

"I live and breathe so that I can see another Exmass okay, it's like. Fuck, I've failed you. Jacqui do you even know the story?" Aria was in a sing-song groove by now.

"Aria, I think you're the only one I've ever met who knows what this thing's about. You seem to think it's, like, normal, it's totally not normal. You're weird." Mako giggled and drawled through the last syllable. Jacqui had her mouth half-cocked, but Mako had done her job for her. Aria feigned offence.

"Well I guess I just have to inform you all."

"Over dinner babe, should be ready now."

And with that the five of them slinked over to the planning table, now decked out in their finest, most recently washed crockery out of whatever wasn't smashed in the maelstrom left after their run-in with Detachment.

"So. We start all the way back in pre-flight Earth days. Like, waaaay long ago."

Just a few broad strokes into the story, Mako was on tenterhooks, Orth and Cass looked like they wanted to take notes, and Jacqui was full of love for the joy and enthusiasm Aria was exhibiting. She leant on her fist, slowly eating and keeping gentle eyes on her girlfriend.

"It was awful. Crummy as can be. Not to dissimilar to Counterweight I guess, but way colder and without the domes. It was a barren wasteland of ice and water. Capable of sustaining life, sure, but no more than sustain. It had been like that for longer than people cared to remember, and most were in utter despair. There really wasn't much to do through the long winter months other than hunker down under the ice and wait for Sol to re-emerge in the new year.

Until one person, one brilliant mind. Aleksander Imr Reichenbach-Klaus. Xander Klaus for short."

Aria wore a prideful and satisfied smile. A moment passed, silent apart from Mako coughing up the excessively large potato he had tried to swallow whole, before Orth piped up. "Uhh... And? Who was the dude?"

She remembered just how woefully uninformed her audience was and launched straight back in.

"They were a genius. Not one of those right-place-right-time lucky people. A real, bona fide genius. They pretty much single-handedly devised exomass hyperdynamics as a discipline."

The audience stayed quizzical.

"You know, that doohickey in the engine that AuDy keeps wanting a bigger one of that somehow means we can like, ignore gravity and stuff? That's all exomass tech."

Mako mouthed a silent 'wow'. Orth's brow was still furrowed very deeply. "Please continue", he offered, not moving an inch.

"Exmass is on a Sol-year cycle right? Like I said, not much to do in the middle of Earth's awful winter. Unless you're Klaus. In which case, a few days after solstice, you take the chance to test your invention for the first time."

"Bullshit. What, you mean, some scientist single-handedly dragged humanity into the space age? And I mean, that name. That's a bullshit name. Too long. Only an idiot trying to fake an ID ends up with a name that long."

Jacqui had her arms crossed and a bit of a smirk - Aria couldn't exactly tell how much of this was a tease and how much was genuine incredulity.

"Well, not on their own. They were in that spaceship, and trying to achieve orbital departure in the middle of a glacial blizzard isn't the safest of plans. They did leave all their theories and designs though, and they certainly proved enlightening."

"Oh so, they single-handedly invented space travel and martyred themselves for it? Get outta here."

Okay, that looked more like genuine disbelief.

"Do you trust me, Jacqui?"

"Huh? Like, yeah but. I don't like where this is going."

"My debut EP. The second to last track is a ballad. What's it called."

" _imr_. Hang on- oh fuck, I always thought that was an acronym."

"Do you think I could have got a wild story about a misunderstood messiah through the A&R team if I didn't couch it in terms that EarthHome were happy with? Especially so early in my career. In fact, that was the first one of my own songs I was allowed to put out, just because they liked it as an option for a holiday season re-release."

"Huh." Jacqui's face returned to its wondrous gaze. She was entranced. She had been for years.

"It's the truth. It really is. Or at least it's the truth we've all been living as long as we can remember."

"Why do you like the story so much?"

"Well it's just how I wrote it in the song. Self-sacrifice is terrifying and hard. But for the people we love, it's worth it. Maybe even necessary. It's something I really do believe."

"The character in the song was a drunk with delusions of grandeur."

"And the brightest and most generous of us look like that sometimes."

No clinking of cutlery at that point. The lamb carcass had been stripped and everyone was deep in their thoughts. Cass was first to stir, offering to clear up, and that was the trigger for everyone to resume gentle chatter, mostly commenting on Jacqui's exceptional cooking skill. As they passed Aria's shoulder, they traced a gentle hand on her shoulder and smiled. It was forced, but not in a way that hid pain. It was a smile offering their heart and soul. "I guess Arms over there got you back earlier. Feel free to not keep your end of the bargain."

Aria giggled gently, grabbed the liquor and set about dragging the gang back onto the sofas as Cass slinked out into the kitchen to drop the plates off. They took an extra moment - grabbed a bottle of wine from the fridge, got halfway back out the door, stopped and put the bottle back. They breathed deeply, curling up onto their tiptoes. With a sigh and a tug of their lapels, they settled back down and strode back into the dining room. By the time they got back, Mako had started doing an impression of Ibex, with everyone in hysterics - apart from Orth who was very clearly giving Mako massive side-eye as he went straight for the last of his whiskey. Aria took it as her cue to initiate the drinking games.

Aria did end up keeping to her end of the bargain to Cass' slight disappointment - but only up until Mako, entirely of his own accord, decided Cass was clearly the best cuddler of everyone present and ended up first draped across them on the couch, and then back between their legs.

In the small hours, once Orth was gently snoozing and Aria and Jacqui were much more concerned with each other than the rest of the room, Cass turned back to Mako. "Hey."

"Hey!" Not even a solid day of drinking could repress Mako's effortless joy, as he twisted up onto his knees to face Cass.

"Hey I... I realise I can't guarantee much. But I'm here for ya, pal. I hope you know that."

Mako was overflowing. "Um. Thanks! Yeah, I guess? Yeah I do. Know, I mean. It's a lot, and this whole leaving Counterweight thing is a lot and going to September is too but. Yeah, it's just-"

And there, holding him in their arms, Cass shut Mako up the easiest way they could think of. Slowly melting into each other, months of anxiety and existential dread being discarded in a bonfire of spirits, Aria's bracelet camera clicked to life again, cutting across the dull hum of the engines.


End file.
